Vigilance thwarts London bombing

LONDON -- It was a minor call to the emergency services: A man in a nightclub hit his head and needed medical attention. It set in motion a chain of events that potentially saved many lives.

LONDON -- It was a minor call to the emergency services: A man in a nightclub hit his head and needed medical attention. It set in motion a chain of events that potentially saved many lives.

It was the kind of vigilance Londoners have exercised from the beginnings of IRA violence in the 1970s. And now they're being urged to keep it up and help track down the latest would-be bombers.

Thursday was ladies' night at the Tiger Tiger on busy Haymarket Street near Piccadilly Circus. The nightclub was crawling with people.

The ambulance crew that arrived early yesterday to help the injured clubber saw smoke coming from a light green Mercedes sedan and called police.

The police found the car loaded with nails packed around canisters of propane and gasoline.

Hours later, they discovered a blue Mercedes that had been parked nearby with similar explosives after alert garage attendants smelled gas and called the police.

Bomb squads manually disabled the devices, and authorities appealed to the public to help find the drivers and their accomplices.

The terrorist plot, coming only two days after Gordon Brown took over as prime minister, raised the specter of the attacks in July 2005 when the London Underground and a double-decker bus were targeted by a group of homegrown terrorists who killed 52 people.

As police searched for car bombs and terrorists in the city of 7.5 million, roads were closed and police sirens echoed. Authorities stepped up security across Britain, with special attention to central London streets and the Wimbledon tennis tournament a few miles to the southwest.

But Londoners -- with long experience in dealing with bombs and terrorism -- were not in hiding, and the West End was bustling again by nightfall.

"I know you can't live your life being scared," Natalie Huntley, 28, a tourist from Adelaide, Australia, said outside St. Paul's Cathedral as police investigated another suspicious vehicle parked on nearby Fleet Street. "You've just got to keep going, don't you?"

The discovery of the car bombs before they exploded allowed police to check for fingerprints and DNA, as well as other trace evidence. They also have the benefit of closed-circuit TV cameras that cover much of central London.

The footage would be run through license-plate recognition software, said Peter Clarke, London's anti-terror police chief. There are 160 security cameras in the Westminster Council, the district encompassing Piccadilly Circus and Haymarket.

Police -- reportedly armed with a "crystal-clear" image of one of the suspects -- were hunting for three men from Birmingham, England. One suspect might be linked to al-Qaida militant Dhiren Barot, who was convicted of targeting New York and London with limousine bombs, ABC News said.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the plot, and government security officials said last night that no suspects have been identified.

The second bomb, announced about 20 hours after the first was discovered, suggested a coordinated and more sophisticated plot than was initially thought -- similar to the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings where four bombs exploded within an hour of one another on London's busy transit system.

Some analysts said the bombers could be trying to send a message to Britain's new leader.

"It's a way of testing Gordon Brown," said Bob Ayers, a security expert at the Chatham House research group. "It's not too far-fetched to assume it was designed to expedite the decision on withdrawal" from Iraq.

Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, said a number of factors could have prompted the plot.

"With the change in prime minister this could be the work of al-Qaida," he said. "They have a track record of trying to influence political change through violent means such as in the Madrid train attacks."

British authorities and White House press secretary Tony Snow were cautious.

"Look, it's terrorism, but we don't know if there -- there's no definite, there's no established connection with any organization at this point," Snow said.

There had been no intelligence of planned attacks from al-Qaida, a British government official said yesterday on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.

The July 7 bombers were all Muslims raised in Britain. A government account of the attacks released last year said it was unclear whether others in Britain had radicalized or incited the group, and that it was not known if al-Qaida figures, or others, had assisted in planning the bombing.

Next to the Mercedes outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub, photographs showed a canister bearing the words "patio gas," indicating it was propane of the type usually used in backyard barbecues and patio heaters.

Sky News television reported that a police officer seized a telephone from the car -- thought to have been a potential detonator -- and an American lawmaker briefed on the investigation confirmed that British authorities found a cell phone.

"They found a cell phone and it was going to be used to detonate the bomb," said U.S. Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y.

The bomb in the Mercedes near Piccadilly Circus was powerful enough to have caused "significant injury or loss of life" at a time when hundreds were in the area, Clarke said.

The announcement of the second bomb came after police had closed off a nearby major street along Hyde Park for several hours to investigate a suspicious Mercedes. That car had been towed across town to an impounding lot; the attendants there, on the alert after news of the first foiled car bombing, smelled gasoline and alerted authorities.

The car had been parked on Cockspur Street, which runs between Haymarket and Trafalgar Square. About 2:30 a.m., it was ticketed and then towed an hour later to the impounding lot on Park Lane, Clarke said.

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